Take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: most of your needs are being met right now. But you’re also devoting most of your life to maintaining them.

The biggest portion of your day is spent working for money. Most of your money goes to buy physiological needs: shelter, food, transportation.

Other than that you spend a lot of time sleeping, eating and cleaning. You spend time unwinding and socializing mostly just to stay sane. My point is that I might be spending more time on details than you, but almost all of your time is spent fighting entropy one way or another.

Our society is very focused on the idea that you should be accomplishing something important all the time. But is that reasonable to given how much time we have to spend just living? Instead, I think you should be measured on whether you do everyday tasks with grace. Is your life aesthetically pleasing?

Thermodynamics can be seen as a game where you’re trying to get work done and God, your opponent, is trying to cause the heat death of the universe. Here are the rules:

0. You must play
1. You can’t win
2. You can’t break even
3. You can’t quit

The second rule is usually called “entropy”: eventually every system will run out of the capacity to do work (“free energy” / “negentropy”). The capacity to do work comes from difference in energy: stuff gets done while energy moves around. Entropy is usually interpreted to mean that all systems tend toward lower complexity / less order / homogeneity.

Creationists say that entropy is an argument against naturally-occurring life. But life on earth is mooching off the sun. The sun is dying; the solar system’s total entropy is increasing; life is just a random blip:

Some scientists even figure that life increases entropy faster than a static earth would (“Sooner or later everything turns to shit” – Woody Allen). Eventually the negentropy required to sustain life will be gone and everything will be dead – but we’ve got at least a billion years.